Tuesday, 29 August 2017

Just a quick one, but
something that should be celebrated every year if you ask me…

THE RANGE HAS BECOME THE
FIRST SHOP THIS YEAR TO GET THEIR HALLOWEEN SECTION OUT! At least in Romford, I
assume Romford is emblematic of the whole country while simultaneous hoping
this isn’t the case at all. I mean if it was, there’s be a nationwide shortage
of spray tan and track suits, but as I don’t follow the spray tan or track suit
industry this could well be the case, what was I talking about? Oh yeah,
motherfucking Halloween! For a couple of months a year shops that are usually
no more than a necessity becomes fun and interesting and The Range is the first
to strike Halloween o’clock, well technically it’s getting ready to strike –
they were still putting their stuff out (they hadn’t priced anything when I was
there this morning) but that didn’t stop me from taking pictures and out of
pure glee:

Monday, 28 August 2017

Welcome to the last
Bootsale Report of the year, and given how jumbled and rotten the last one was
that’s probably a good thing.

Still I’m feeling it a lot
more today, and by ‘it’ I mean gross amounts of pain. I managed to bruise a bunch
of ribs on Clacton-on-Sea’s rollercoaster Stella’s
Revenge because the ride is a broken piece of shit that was manned by a
fucking tool - now I can’t bend down, run, belch or take deep breaths without
searing pain. “So why did you walk around a bootsale all morning then dwietfry,
you utter prat?” because I’d already said I would is the fairly boring answer,
this was our second time ‘doing’ a bootsale this season (so we had a stall) and
I said I’d help my mum sell off some more of my late grandfather’s stuff
(mostly fishing paraphernalia that sells surprisingly fast) and it was actually
a good thing. I went for a wander ‘round the (rather small) bootsale and was
able to just (cliché incoming) loose myself, focussing on lots of things that
weren’t constant pain for a couple of hours I was if not happy then at least
peaceful – and not in pain, have I used the word ‘pain’ enough to get across
how uncomfortable I’ve been for the last week? And of course I bought some
shit:

‘Weird’ is my assessment of
that haul, and not just because it features Shrek, a pile of rotting flesh,
Wile E. Coyote, whatever those things down the front are (we’ll get to them)
and a seal in a wetsuit and goggles (his name’s Zoggy). I can’t really put my
finger on why my purchases seem odd; perhaps ‘atypical’ is better? It just
feels weird, what it isn’t is sucky – at least not to me – you may have your
own opinions on what I buy and that opinion may very well be ‘why?’ but for me
this spread is made of excitement and personal achievements in shopping. I
would have liked to have pulled in some more action figures, I came home with a
measly 6 (seven if you count the gorilla, I’m not counting Captain Scarlet as
he’s in fact a fully articulated torch – no I didn’t know such things existed either)
but otherwise this is win, win and more win for me, allow me to elaborate on
that. So are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:

Saturday, 26 August 2017

Time for a post about old and/or dead theme parks, I remain hopelessly fascinated by them so everyone
else must be too, that’s how it works right?

I’m mostly interested in
just one old ride at this park but I shall recap the whole story for you. The
park in question is Pleasure Island in Wakefield, Massachusetts U.S. which used
to be situated where the Edgeware Office Park now stands. At over 80 acres the
park was designed by C. V. Wood’s Marco Engineering company: a key figure in
acquiring the land for and designing Disneyland C. V. Wood had left and set up Marco
Engineering specifically to create knock-off Disneylands (they’d already built
the Magic Mountain park in Colorado by this point). The park came out of a concept for ‘Child Life World’
by Bill Hawkes, publisher of Child Life
magazine with the intent to educate at is entertained, never a good idea in my
mind: every time a park tries to educate it usually ends up being EPCOT: boring
then with drunks sleeping in it. Ground was broken in February 1959 and it took
four months and between four and four and a half million dollars to build.

The park opened on Monday
22nd June 1959 with Fess Parker and Rita Moreno there (amongst
others) to mark the occasion, four years after Disneyland (Fess Parker was
there as well, he missed his cue) and with the very bold tag-line ‘Disneyland of the Northeast’. It was very much a cheap but charming
Disneyland-lite with a mixture of standard tourist trap attractions, petting
zoo animals and some suspiciously similar attractions like: Space Rocket
(Mission to Mars), The Old Smokey Line (Disneyland Railroad), Jenney cars (The
Autopia), Pepsi-Cola’s Diamond Lil Show (Golden Horseshoe Revue) and Moby Dick
Hunt (Jungle River Cruise) – in fact it had pretty much everything Frontierland
had back then, not that those things were very original to begin with. The
first season bankrupted Hawke’s corporation: 75,000 guests were forecast but
around half that turned up so three investors from Boston bought the park and
ran it from 1960 to 1969, that grand re-opening had the Three Stooges. It did have monkeys on Monkey Island though
(Disney didn’t have monkeys!) and a fairly interesting sounding dark ride
called The Wreck of the Hesperus where riders travelled underwater and were
warned off by King Neptune himself as they left, it sounds pretty similar to
Submarine Voyage which was being developed at the time (it actually opened after
Pleasure Island) and given how many other elements of the park were inspired by
Disney I wouldn’t doubt that there’s a connection. Unless you come from
Wakefield or were a kid in the nearby area (or with family nearby) between 1959
and 1969 the park seems relatively uninteresting - except for the
aforementioned Hunt Moby Dick ride, which you may have noticed is the tile of
this post.

Wednesday, 23 August 2017

[merrily sings] For the
very first time ever when they had a revolution in Nic-uraguera there was no
interference from Ameri-ca, human rights in Ameri-ca, the people fought the
leader and up he flew with no Washington Bullets what else could he dooo-oo-oo? SAANND -INISTA![/merry sings] and
then Ronald Reagan came along and ballsed it up.

So when shitting out these
Quick Crappy Reviews I usually like to stay fairly recent, today I’m ignoring
that rule so this is the first Retro Crappy Review. Why bother? Well whole
blogs and YouTube channels are based around reviewing toys way older than this
set (which came in 2016, hardly ancient) so it’s not like it matters when the
toy was made but the reason I’m breaking the rule now is as follows: I bought
Neca’s Contra two-pack cheap at the summer LFCC convention this year, went to
get it out of its box while taking photos for other stuff in the loft and
decided that there was so much to it that it deserved a Quick Crappy Review (poor thing) and it would give me a
forum to waffle on about it at the lengths I felt it & I needed.

So this is Neca’s Contra
two-pack from their Video Game Series, The concept is making figures painted to
replicate the sprites used in video games starring that character and is a
result of the phenomenally positive reaction to (and subsequent sales of) a
Jason Vorhees variant released as a San Diego Comic Con exclusive in 2013 based
on his (completely erroneous) sprite in the ‘infamous’ NES game Friday the 13th, I own one -
it is amazing. Mostly the figures are repaints or slightly altered versions of
figures NECA have already put out, I did a QCR of the Gremlins 2: The New Batch
release from the series a little while ago. The Contra two-pack however was the
first Video Game Series release to be new characters, new figures and characters
not from films, it was released in Quarter 3 2016. Got all that? This post is
gonna be boringly succinct information heavy so acclimatise yourself and I can
only apologize.

Sunday, 20 August 2017

Ifeel dead inside, so
maybe this isn’t the best time to write a blog post enthusing about old toys.

Today I walked around a sun
drenched field, a light breeze ruffling my hair – or at least it would if I had
any – feeling hollow and empty inside, like an Easter egg but less delicious,
and as I wandered and questioned how my life had turned out the way it had, I
bought some old junk off other people:

Leaving my teenage poetry
to one side, I did ok for someone who certainly hadn’t brought their a-game to this
bootsale, there may not be too much there that’d wow ‘proper’ toy collectors
with their mint-in-box Battlerams and carded Bobba Fetts but there’s a lot of
my interests catered for in two (hopelessly fucked) carrier bags worth of stuff
and some nice big ticks of my list of shit I need to own now plz, that should
probably be capitalized, fuck it. That Care Bear’s a re-issue by the way, it’s
the first time I’ve ever fucked up buying vintage Care Bears and it genuinely
made me really angry at myself for a few lines, it’s not too big a deal in this
case because a) it was 50p and b) I already have a vintage Birthday Bear in a
larger size but it was still a silly mistake I shouldn’t have made. So off we
go again, I’ve pulled out some stuff from the haul that I can squeeze a marginally
entertaining paragraph out and today we have anecdotes, M&Ms, bears,
dragons and Diesel looking two parts 1990s country singer and 1 part 1990s porn
star so are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:

Thursday, 17 August 2017

In these photos that Leafa's left hand is always the same despite swapping hands being a major part of the toy, this is because the peg broke off while i was swapping hands (y'know, what the toy's supposed to do) to take these photos and I had to superglue on the hand I intended to use for display. It's also why the pictures are a bit boring, so if you'd always wanted to see Leafa lined up with the Planeteers using an amulet and the cry 'incest' to help call Captain Planet, I'm sorry - blame Max Factory. Figmra really are a quality control quagmire.

Well this turned up quicker
than I expected. Sword Art Online seems to have settled into being the
Nickleback of anime, it’s very popular but no one ever seems to admit to liking
it, well fuck that I like Silver Side Up
and Sword Art Online is one of my favourite anime. Being a contrary fucker like
I am it wasn’t the opening Aincrad arc (where the characters are stuck in a
virtual reality MMORPG where death in the game equals death in real life) that
won me over (it has pacing issues) but later, less popular story-arcs –
especially Phantom Bullet and Mother’s Rosario - and to be a really contrary
fucker I loved the Fairy Dance arc. The common complaint I’ve read is that
without the threat of dying the arc loses a lot of its weight and stakes, and
the incest thing, I thought the incest thing was adorable and I’d argue that
the arc simply has different stakes,
Aincrad was about survival while Fairy Dance is a race against time, the longer
Kirito leaves it the closer Asuna gets to becoming a sex toy and if he takes
too long that slimy fucker Sugou will consummate the marriage of Oberon and
Titania regardless of Titania’s feelings on the matter – I’d argue that racing
to stop your wife being raped repeatedly is a good enough replacement for
making sure you don’t die.

Monday, 14 August 2017

Hey it’s the first Marvel
Legends figure to get a Quick Crappy Review! That’s because I hold the uncommon
and unpopular opinion that Marvel Legends are often a bit shit, which should do
wonders for my already terrible view count.
In truth some of it’s me, I have a lot of emotional baggage and some of
it is connected to superhero collector’s figures (because of course) but some of
it is the same issues Marvel figures have had since Toy Biz: unappealing art
style (sculpt style?), horribly obviously joints, ridiculous muscle definition,
terrible faces and ugly paint washes, troubles that Hasbro has only been
overcoming once or twice a wave in the last two years or so. Please don’t hate
me.

Anyway Ms. Marvel is from
the Marvel’s Sandman wave of Marvel Legends because Hasbro decided the best thing
for their Legends series was to forgo silly shit like numbers and name ‘em
after the build-a-figure. Sometimes a wave also uses a character name or film
title (e.g. Captain America: The Winter Soldier) but this series doesn’t, it’s
themed around Spider-Man and considered a Spider-Man wave but the web-swinger’s
name or logo doesn’t’ appear anywhere on the packaging bar the names of the
figures (cos there’s a figure called ‘Spider-Man’ in this wave). Ms. Marvel is
this wave’s ‘guest star’, Hasbro have settled on a nice habit of throwing in a
roughly thematic but mostly unrelated character or two per wave as a way of
getting those characters out i.e. Death’s Head II in the Guardians of the
Galaxy Vol 2 wave or Sister Grimm in the Doctor Strange wave. Funnily enough,
those ‘guest stars’ are usually the ones I buy.

Friday, 11 August 2017

It’s been over a year since
I had A Look At anything without a Sonic character in the book, that’s quite
unacceptable.

So the story behind
Ex-Mutants then:

The concept came from a
conversation between Eternity editor William Davidson and Eternity publisher
Kevin Myers with the basic setup coming from the latter. Created as a jab at
the black and white independent books that had sprung up in the wake of Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtle’s success (as a comic book) the gag was going to be that
the whole set-up was a complete inversion of TMNT and its pretenders, the
characters would be the only humans in a world filled with mutants and the
title would be Young Ex-Mutant Samurai Humans. Ugh, thank god they got David
Lawrence on board to write it, well actually ‘they’ didn’t, Eternity went to
Campiti & Associates, a provider of comic book ‘packages’ – this used to be
a big thing in the 1940s, basically a company that hires comic book artists and
writers and produces comics that are then sold on to publishers, Will Eisner
used to have one and Jack Kirby used to work for one, just as examples. Anyway
Campiti & Associates bright in Lawrence (and Campiti is credited as
co-creator of the characters in issue 1) and also Ron Lim, yes THAT Ron Lim,
the bloke who drew Silver Surfer and Iron Man and all that, this was back when
he had a style.

Top to Bottom: Angela, Erin, Lorelei, Vikki, Belushi

Then it gets complicated,
Ex-Mutants was given a shorter, better title to match the more serious book
that Lawrence & Lim had turned the concept into and released, it was a big
hit and sold over 75,000 copies for Eternity Comics. However at roughly the same time it was being
a hit there was problems behind-the-scenes between Eternity bigwig Brian
Marshall, David Campiti (of Campiti & Associates), some creators and a
bloke named Scott Mitchell Rosenberg who also owned Malibu Comics, a
distribution company and was financing Eternity. To settle the row Rosenberg
came up with the novel idea of just giving each of the rowing parties their own
comic companies, Campiti was put in charge of Amazing Comics and Wonder Color
Comics so Ex-Mutants moved over. Amazing Comics printed Ex-Mutants 2-5 and was supposed
to print the Ex-Mutants spin-off The New Humans; they also reprinted a revamped
and expanded version of Ex-Mutants #1 as Ex-Mutants: The Special Edition. Then
people stopped getting paid, then office equipment stopped getting paid for,
then The Comics Journal revealed Rosenberg’s involvement with Eternity, Amazing
and Wonder Color, then rumours began to circulate that Rosenberg was going to
dump everything but Malibu, then Rosenberg dumped everything but Malibu
(Eternity was kept as an imprint). The Campini people jumped ship before the
dumping, taking Ex-Mutants with them and self-publishing through Pied Piper
Comics, they published Ex-Mutants issues 6-8, The New Humans and the first
issue of the Ex-Mutants Micro Series (Ex-Mutants Micro Series: Erin #1), plus
some issues of Wild Knights (another spin-off, they appear in this story we’re
Looking At). However there was a legal battle over ownership of Ex-Mutants, in
the end Lawrence and Lim couldn’t afford to keep fighting so threw in the towel
and the rights to everything reverted to Eternity. Eternity reprinted issues 6
& 7 as special 40 page editions (but not issue 8) and Ex-Mutants
Micro-Series: Erin #1 and the unpublished Ex-Mutants Micro Series: Vikki #1 as
the first two issues of Solo Ex-Mutants. Ex-Mutants would then be relaunched
under Malibu with a different set of characters – that’s what the Mega Drive
game is based off by the way.

Eternity also re-printed
the first three issues of Ex-Mutants as a small graphic novel called Ex-Mutants
Volume 1: The Saga Begins which I found at an indoor market while on holiday in
Devon (that market was immense, a mix of flea market, bootsale and farmer’s
market but held in giant old metal cattle barns). I was very new to American
comics at the time and just assumed it was an X-Men book from the 1980s I
didn’t know about. I was wrong obviously (although I’m sure others made the
same mistake, at least they better’ve had or I’ll feel REALLY stupid and I
don’t want that) but I remained fascinated, it was filled with mutants and tits
and I was about 12 so it’s not too surprising I got into it and you know they’re still two of the things I
like about the book today *sigh* I’m pathetic. Anyway I’ve been meaning to do
something on the Ex-Mutants since I started blogging, this is what you’re
getting so are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:

Sunday, 6 August 2017

I really like bootsales, I
know I grouse about them on here sometimes and they are filled with
inconveniences (or ‘other buyer’s as that’s also known as) and the occasional
utter wanker selling: today while enquiring about the price of a large bendy
Ned the Noodle (an old Pot Noodle mascot) a woman asked me to give her a price,
knowing nothing about Ned the Noodle other than he worked for Pot Noodle I
offered her £2 (I dunno) – she scoffed and told me she wanted £13 because he’s £20 on eBay – if you know how
much you want, why fucking ask me to name a price? To get the chance to feel
superior? You’re that desperate for that feeling that you need to use Ned the
fucking Noodle dolls to achieve it? I didn’t buy Ned.

But I do love bootsales,
they’re car-crash fascinating, they’re usually relevant to my interests and
they’re always unpredictable. I haven’t ‘done a bootsale’ (that is, sell at
one) since I was about 15 but my grandad died last winter and we were left with
a shed (and half a loft) full of his old fishing gear so we finally got around
to setting up a stall at my local bootsale haunt, Dunton Bootsale, and outing
all this dark green stuff that he’d accumulated over decades of having only one
hobby. We did really well if you’re interested, Dunton has a bunch of really
good fishing good stalls that turn up every well so a lot of fishermen get down
there and the dealers who run those stalls are always happy to buy new stock of
clueless civilians like us. My morning was a stream of quirky 50-somethings,
boxes of old toys and a disturbingly large amount of taxidermy (what was up
with that Dunton Bootsale bods? Stuffed dead things were bleedin’ everywhere) and
that is not a bad way to spend the day of rest. I also did exceedingly well as
a buyer, hauling a sack of goodies home with me, and I do mean a sack of
goodies, here is my literal sack of goodies:

And here is that sack of
goodies, all cleaned up and in a lovely group shot:

Considering that’s all toys
the variety is noteworthy and delightful: stuff ranging from the early 1980s to
things still on store shelves now (hopefully you can make out the Indominus Rex
behind the Halloween Bears, if you can’t that’s ok, IT CAN CAMOUFLARRRGE after all);
from the collectible to things that aren’t worth shit (I paid 25p for that
Bayformer and I still feel I overpaid – but Slag’s my favourite Dinobot and I couldn’t
help it); from playsets to cereal prizes. Now I’m gonna talk about some for a
paragraph apiece! You’re so lucky! And as always I’m not saying these are the
best buys, the best bargains or objectively or subjectively the best things in
that photo they’re just the ones I can get a paragraph of babble out of (and it’s
a good shopping trip when you don’t need
to highlight such great scores as a Rogun or a still-carded Babylon 5 figure)
so are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll being:

Wednesday, 2 August 2017

So I was reading a post on site Dinosaur Dracula about old comic book ads,
I couldn’t sleep and I kill time like this. The first two ads were for
Soda-Licious sweets starring 7-UP’s Cool Spot and the film Candyman and I realised that these two completely unrelated things are coincidentally responsible for two of
my most vivid memories from the same period of my childhood (roughly late 1993,
I would have been 7). I also realised that I hadn’t told anyone either of these
stories, not family, not friends, there is nobody in my life or who has been in
my life in the last 10 years who knows these two things, if I die tomorrow no
one will ever know these things about me. I wasn’t happy with that. I was suffering
from heavy bout of depression and with it long, extreme panic attacks so I wasn’t
exactly emotionally stable and the thought that no one would ever know the
story about me and Candyman upset me, so I wrote both stories out on Word,
along the way I added a third story that was in the same boat because the Cool
Spot story reminded me of it. Now I’m going to share them with the internet so
that at least one person knows them and sleep a little easier. So are you
sitting comfortably? Then I’ll being:

Me and Cool Spot

For a while I completely
worshipped Cool Spot, I should have just built an alter made out of 7-UP
bottles and those horrible cheap sunglasses they sold by the counter and
honestly I did so much weird shit by myself when I was under 10 that I can’t
say for certain I didn’t. Spot or Cool Spot was a mascot for 7-UP, he was
introduced in 1987 and was an anthropomorphic version of the big red circle in
the 7-UP logo, he also wore sunglasses and trainers because that’s what cool
people do. The Spot was never used to promote 7-UP here in the UK (Fido Dido
was, more on that in a minute) but the video game Cool Spot was released. It makes more sense than you think, Cool
Spot looked and played like any other me-too mascot platformer that came out in
the wake of Sonic the Hedgehog’s success and it was developed by Virgin Games –
who were a British firm. I latched the fuck onto this game and if you’d’ve
asked me at the time I’d’ve said it was my second favourite, behind only Sonic the Hedgehog 2, I rated this thing
that much – I still think it’s a decent (if a little unforgiving) 2D platformer
but then I wouldn’t expect anything else from a game programmed by David ‘The
Earthworm Jim Bloke’ Perry. To me Cool Spot was as big as any video game star,
if I drew a picture of video game stars (a fairly common occurrence) he’d be on
there alongside Sonic, Mario, Link and Pac-Man, when my grandad gave me a fancy
wooden wine bottle box to store my Mega Drive cartridges in I drew Cool Spot on
it – again putting him in the same league as Sonic, Knuckles, Ecco, the Ferrari
Testarossa and Alex Kidd. But the memory that I stumbled across, the point of this
segment is this:

One day while wandering
around in my garden I decided to create my
own garden, the best of gardens, and sat down to drawn it. I drew
everything the same way at this point, in biro on Computer Paper – that’s what
we all called it, my mum used to ‘get’ it from work and it was neither A4 nor
A3 – I insisted this was the way to get the best results, I eventually learned
what a pencil was. I thought I still had this drawing and had it scanned but I
don’t, I’m sorry, but I can remember it shocking vividly, I also remember that
I didn’t finish it. It was a big garden, there was a few things I’d still put a
my dram garden today (fibre-glass dinosaurs and a swimming pool) and some stuff
that society and advertising had taught me was cool in late ’93 early ’94 , it
included a skate park for instance even though I could not and still cannot skateboard
in any way that doesn’t involve me sitting on the board and drinking juice cartons
but it wasn’t for me anyway it was for all the cool friends having this awesome
garden would absolutely guarantee me, I used to imagine being 13 and being part
of a gang fairly often then, everyone had bomber jackets, Converse All-Stars
and sunglasses and I was thin. Getting back to the point though is that below
the skate park was my fountain, because all big gardens need one and it was a
Cool Spot themed fountain where in the centre water would squirt and raise Spot
into the air (this is genuinely a thing that water features can do, I don’t
know if they can lift a large statue of a fizzy drink mascot but it’s legit
thing). I was so into this food mascot who I didn’t even know was a food mascot
that immortalizing him in thousands of pounds worth of marble fountain wasn’t
even a maybe but just something that obviously had to be. It was one of the
first things I thought of if I remember correctly ‘in my dream garden I must
have…a swimming pool, a Cool Spot fountain, dinosaurs…”.

Me and Fido Dido

While we’re on the very
specific subject of 7-UP mascots: The Fido Dido Jacket. Fido Dido was the
mascot for 7-UP in the UK for a long time, a lot longer than in the states because
we never had Spot, and I still consider him to be THE mascot for the brand,
it’s Tony the Tiger or Ronald McDonald or whathaveya. Turns out he’s not owned
by PepsiCo but was licenced, he was created by two women from New York (Joanna
Ferrone and Sue Rose, who is the horrible human being responsible for
inflicting Angela Anaconda on the world) and dates back to 1985, who knew.
Anyway I grew up in (and currently live in) a town called Collier Row which is
in Romford (it’s next door to Romford itself), it’s built around a roundabout
(Americans: those are circular things you drive cars around) with four streets
coming off it in a rough X shape, this is ‘up the top’ where our shops all are.
For a while my mum and nan worked in a ‘cheap shop’ called Saint’s – I miss it
so –which was on the same side as the Library (it was about two shops up from
it actually) where there was also for a while this clothing shop that sold,
amongst other things, bomber jackets. It was run by a short Indian gentleman
who had a really full head of hair and shouted a lot, that’s all I remember
about it other than the Fido Dido Jackets.

He used to hang them from
his shop’s canopy; they were that shiny material and used to shimmer in the sun
like Aztek treasure. I lusted after them so badly, I used to stand and stare at
them to the sounds of the owner shouting at someone (I presume it was at
someone, he could have just been insane). I’m pretty sure they each had Fido
Dido wearing a Fido Dido bomber jacket (meta?) with his back turned, but
turning around to look at ‘the camera’, I wanted to be as cool as Fido Dido. I
was weirdly obsessed with the concept of cool as a kid, I blame Sonic the
Hedgehog, my weird preconceived notions about coolness and what it meant meant
I never told anyone about my wanting for these jackets except maybe a passing
mention to my mum in the most fake-casual way a child can mention something. They
weren’t particularly expensive and I’m sure my mum or nan would have got me one
as my winter coat that year had I asked but I assumed the following: because
they were so cool (and shiny) they were really expensive, further I didn’t
understand the concept of ‘unofficial’ (read: bootleg) back then and would
never have thought that something was anything more than 100% official if it
featured a ‘proper’ person or character and not a knock-off and 100% official meant
it was expensive (I’d learnt this via knock-off action figures, seriously); that
I simply wasn’t allowed to own such a
jacket because I was too young and too uncool to do so, so I shouldn’t ask for
one because it wasn’t appropriate. Instead I just stopped and stared at the
shiny jackets with the 7-UP mascot who looked a bit too much like Gary Rhodes
and imagined being roughly 13 and owning one (because they would never go out
of style and never not be available in my hometown) walking down the street
with a posse of similarly attired youths.

Also it always struck me as
really wrong that Fido Dido jackets came in anything other than green, I think
it still would today.

Me and Candyman

Fuck Candyman, oh don’t get
me wrong Candyman is a superb horror film and easily one of the finest of its
decade but fuck Candyman because Candyman manged to traumatise me for around a
month as a child and I hadn’t even seen the bloody thing (also because it’s all
one word and that upsets Microsoft World, this paragraph is filled with angry
jaggedy red lines, cross at me for ignoring them when I clearly have a word
spelt wrong and need to change it). Candyman came out in 1992 when I was 6 so
no one at school had seen it, a couple of kids claimed they had but I knew
their parents for fuck’s sake and they would never let them watch shit like
Candyman but the kids with older siblings or bastard parents had been told
about the film’s plot or overheard about the film’s plot and the legend of
Candyman. For those who haven’t seen it Candyman is just Bloody Mary but a big
black bloke with only one hand and an awesome dress sense, you say ‘Candyman’
three times in front of a mirror and he turns up and kills your ass dead. While
writing this I remembered the name of the little bastards who told me about
this legend, it was fucking Sammi-Jo and Jason and Sammi-Jo still lives ‘round
here so I think I may have to extract twisted revenge. Anyway these two
giggling little turds told me about it and my six year old mind took it
completely at face value, I wasn’t so much scared of the Candyman coming out
the mirror but that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing it when in
front of a mirror and thus dooming myself. We had a lot of mirrors in my house, there was a big one in the hall, one
in the bog obviously and my mum’s bedroom was and is still boarded with
wardrobes with mirrored doors. So I couldn’t piss, leave the house or get a
clean t-shirt (my room was so tiny I stored my clothes in my mum’s room)
without the temptation to call upon the Candyman.

Then I had to spend the
night sleeping in my mum’s room, I can only assume I was
ill because that was usually the only time I slept in there (it was cooler, closer
to the loo and the bed was closer to the ground) and I woke up in the middle of
the night and laying all rolled up like a terrified little hotdog I gave in and
whispered Candyman three times out loud and then shat myself and waited for
death. Which didn’t come – no surprise there, I hate to ruin it for everyone
but even if you want to believe Bloody Mary might work Candyman never does
because Candyman is not based on a real-world legend it’s based on a short
story by Clive Barker. But because I didn’t know that at the time I was instead
convinced that Candyman was just waiting for the right moment and for a good
four weeks afterwards I was as uptight as a priest on trial because I knew that
any moment Candyman was going to lean out any reflective surface at any moment
and slash me open. Oh yeah, because no one had seen the film the rough image
I’d been given of Candyman was that he was a tall bald Black man (mostly true,
he had hair) in a huge fur coat with a huge collar (sort of true, I was told
more along the lines of John Ruth that Isaac Hayes) with an all metal version
of Freddy Krueger’s glove (not true at all). I do mean any reflective surface
btw, I remember walking through a small shopping centre in Romford called The
Liberty and shitting myself past shops like WH Smiths because I thought
Candyman might lunge out from between signs advertising Ruth Rendell and
GamesMaster Magazine and collect the debt owed him. Eventually I just got more
and more confident that he wasn’t coming and the worry subsided, notice that I
didn’t say that I realised Candyman didn’t exist, that never occurred to me and
I had no idea until I went to senior school that Candyman was a film, I just
assumed he hadn’t heard me or because I wasn’t standing facing the mirror it
didn’t count or something like that.

What’s saddest about this
is that sometimes I still have nightmares where I’m lying in my mum’s bed, all
rolled up like a hotdog and can’t stop myself from whispering Candyman three
times. Tony Todd never turns up in it and guts me though; the fear just comes
from being unable to stop myself. So if you live in the UK, when you see a news
report that someone has smeared a 12 foot high ‘I never forgot’ in cowshit on
the house of one Sammi-Jo of Romford, Essex you know where to send the police.

I feel better. I think I
should probably feel embarrassed about revealing these to the world but I was 7!
Everyone does stupid shit when they’re under 10, it’s not like it reflects
badly on them as adults, well unless they killed someone I guess - but I didn’t
kill anyone, at least not that I or you can prove. Ta for reading me go on
about food mascots and slasher villains, you’re all wonderful.